Humanity & Inclusion published a report on 17 June 2026 on what the sharpest contraction in international aid funding is doing to organisations run by people with disabilities. In 2023, before the cuts, disability-specific work received 0.1% of the government aid that can be assigned to a purpose. Around 40% of aid was never assessed for disability inclusion. In 2025 global Official Development Assistance fell 23.1% in real terms, with humanitarian aid down 35.8%.
The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies published a case study on 4 June 2026 about cash assistance for children and adults with disabilities. It cites a UNHCR needs assessment from August 2023, which found that 26.4% of displaced people arriving in Bulgaria from Ukraine were identified as people with disabilities. The Bulgarian Red Cross used that finding to target its winter heating and clothing grants at Ukrainian households with at least one member living with a disability. It was one of three programmes counted as successful.
Large aid organisations employ caseworkers to go into camps and settlements and find people with disabilities. That worker has to be recruited, trained, insured and paid before a single person with a disability has been found. When budgets shrink, staff go first, because people are the most expensive thing an organisation runs. So the visits stop. The help itself is still there — local groups, the neighbour who drives someone to a hospital appointment, the caseworker still at a desk in the same city. What goes is the ability to reach any of it. A top-up sent digitally to a phone number needs no caseworker and no salary, and the person with a disability makes the call themselves. We believe that matters more as the funding falls, not less.
Calling for Help exists to close that gap. Digital inequality leaves refugees with disabilities cut off from help that already exists, so we send free mobile top-ups every month and the person uses them to reach whoever is best placed to help — a caseworker, a clinic, a local organisation, their own family.
We believe it is the most cost-effective humanitarian aid there is. Nobody has to be employed to find them and nobody has to travel: the credit arrives on the number they already use, once they have passed AI-based identity and anti-fraud checks. The pilot has a limited number of places while we find out what it changes.
If you have a disability and are living as a refugee, or you support someone who is, apply to the pilot. To follow what we find, join the newsletter.